Earlier this month I hosted a fireside chat session at the AI Engineer World's Fair with Cat Wu and Thariq Shihipar from Anthropic's Claude Code team. We talked about Claude Code, Claude Tag, Fable, coding agent security, evals, tool design, and how Anthropic use these tools themselves. The full video of the session is now available on YouTube . Below is an edited copy of the transcript, with extra links and my own bolded highlights. A few top-level notes if you don't want to watch the ...

My great pal Eric Drysdale sent out one last note to a set of friends about an event he thought that set would enjoy, and I am extremely lucky to be included in that set. Eric has a beautiful and exquisite comedic sense, an opinion I have that is borne out by his legacy of comedic work, including The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, The Late Show, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee and more. He has stood down 20 years of a world gone mad and reworked it, within hours, into a performance of...

Yup. Goat-proofing the chicken door really worked a treat. FML. 🤦🏼‍♂️ Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . Yup. Goat-proofing the chicken door really worked a treat. FML. 🤦🏼‍♂️ Tha...

In 2021, the United Nations proclaimed July 20th as International Moon Day , via the resolution  76/76  on “international cooperation in the peaceful uses of outer space”. Some key goals of the day are to promote awareness about our Moon’s unique scientific and cultural importance as well as how countries worldwide are exploring it. To that end, I present a curated webpage of linked, free resources for people from all backgrounds to learn about our Moon as well as dive into specific e...

Memory Safety’s Hardest Problem Jul 20, 2026 Uplifting a lobsters comment for easier reference. The central memory safety counter example, the hardest case to solve, doesn’t have anything to do with destructors or heap: const std = @import ( "std" ); const E = union ( enum ) { a: u128 , b: [] const u8 , }; pub fn main () void { const bad_addr: u128 = @intFromPtr ( & main); var e: E = .{ .b = "hello" }; const ...

Here’s the big idea in Keith Johnstone’s book Impro : Children are naturally creative, but are violently formed into repressed adults by Western culture and education The process of becoming more creative and expressive is largely a process of unlearning these habits of repression Improv — improvisational comedy — is thus not just the skeleton key for learning to act, but for unlocking a more authentically human way of life This take doesn’t sound particularly original, bu...

A delayed education on the trenches and scales of suffering A delayed education on the trenches and scales of suffering

I was born in the USA. Many tongues call me "American": Italian ( americano ), French ( Américain ), German ( Amerikaner ), Dutch ( Amerikaan ), Afrikaans ( Amerikaner ), Japanese ( アメリカ人, amerika-jin ), Filipino ( Amerikano ), Hebrew (אמריקני), Arabic (أمريكي), Portuguese ( americano ), Russian ( американец ), and Hindi ( अमरीकी, Amreeki ). I grew up in Southern California. Many of my friends were zeroeth-generation immigrants from Mexico. Weren't...

There was a time when playing at a casino meant a whole performance; getting dressed up, heading into town, and hoping you could grab a seat at your favourite blackjack table. These days, things look very different. And we’re not just talking RNG games either. Live dealer games have taken off, giving players the chance to enjoy the atmosphere of a real casino without leaving the sofa. This is, of course, thanks to the massive leaps in both hardware and software that have happ...

The eleventh episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out : In Episode 11, I chat with flaMEd , the author of flamedfury.com about, among other things, web communities around games and television shows, sharing music interests with a personal website, community in the indie web, and more. I hope you enjoy the episode! Wonders of Web Weaving also has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts. flaMEd flamedfury.com The eleventh episode of Wonders of Web Weav...

Today’s Music Monday is an etymological road trip from Paul Simon’s 1983 album Hearts and Bones . The album was a commercial failure relative to his other works, but it happens to be one of my favourites. This cheeky song is mixed in with some of his most beautiful tunes. Clara and I were lucky to find an original LP pressing at a charity shop this year. Graceland is one of my favourite albums of all time, but I find myself playing Hearts and Bones and his earlier One Trick Pony ...

[written by claude.ai leveraging the new archive.org Supreme Court collection] Eight years before Jack Valenti called the VCR a “Boston strangler,” America’s publishers told the Supreme Court that the office copier would extinguish the printed word. A field guide to the doom prophecies of Williams & Wilkins Co. v. United States (1973–75) — verbatim from the briefs. “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to t...

Last week, someone paid me to review their form flow. One thing they wanted advice about was interruption pages. Coincidentally, the following day the GOV.UK Design System added the interruption page pattern. Interruption pages are designed to pause the user within a journey - usually to warn them about a possible mistake or give them important information before they continue. Here’s an example from the GOV.UK Design System: It has: An h1 heading to ask a simple question ...

Nutan Limaye and Thore Husfeldt guest post on the new deterministic parallel algorithm for bipartite perfect matching by Abhranil Chatterjee, Sumanta Ghosh, Rohit Gurjar, Roshan Raj and Thomas Thierauf. The post will try to explain three main things about the result. What is the result? Why is it important? And finally, how did the authors prove it? We will assume that the reader is an undergraduate student in CS (i.e., the reader knows basics of discrete mathematics, linear algebra, and alg...

By AI Platform’s Model Runtime team and Inference team Introduction Most organizations consume LLMs through hosted APIs. Netflix went further — we run the full stack ourselves, from model deployment through inference, inside our existing production environment rather than a separate ML silo. Some of those decisions weren’t obvious, and a few revealed their trade-offs only under production load. This post focuses on the choices where alternatives were seriously considered: engine select...

A few years ago, a friend of mine was stuck. He needed to quickly process over a hundred high-quality images according to a complicated sequence. He was using Photoshop, but it was going to take him days. Initially, he asked for my help, could I do the manual labor? I spent 15 minutes writing a script with ImageMagick that processed all the images in seconds, but in a completely automated way. When my kids were young, instead of helping them study algebra and grammar, I wrote small JavaScript ...

ROME (July 21, 2026) — Shield AI announced today that V-BAT achieved the highest European Union Aviation Safety Agency’s (EASA) authorization issued to date in Europe for unmanned maritime operations and completed a pilot project with Frontex , the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, and the Italian Coast Guard, flying from the patrol vessel Dattilo in the central Mediterranean. The authorization, reaching SAIL III under the EASA Specific Category framework, was issued by ENAC, Italy’...

Life has scarcely found a boundary on Earth that it can’t push. While much of life’s diversity exists in lush, bountiful habitats like tropical rainforests and coral reefs, even the most brutal corners of the planet are also occupied. The organisms that thrive in extreme environments — blistering temperatures, crushing pressures, corrosive acid — are what we call “extremophiles. Source Life has scarcely found a boundary on Earth that it can’t push. While much of life’s diversity...

Thirty years ago, when I first started writing for Doctor Dobb’s Journal , I decided to do a piece on the object-oriented features that were being added to MATLAB 5. I didn’t know much about them, so I called The MathWorks , told the publicity rep who I was, and asked if they could find me a co-author. A couple of days later I got a call back from a woman who said she had volunteered to help with the article. I assumed she was also from marketing, so I explained again who I was and what ...

This is my review for July's IndieWeb Book Club . You can also read Ege's review on his site hypersubject.net As I mentioned in my IndieWeb Book Club post , I first read Fromm’s book more than 20 years ago. I was in my early high school years when I stumbled upon his work and was immediately intrigued by his way of looking at the world. The fact that he was not “just” a philosopher but also a psychologist and a sociologist meant his ideas felt more concrete and applicable in today...

Email, one of the most pervasive and enduring technologies of computer networking, was invented in about a dozen places by dozens of people in the 1960s. It's hard to lay out a clear history of the technology because it's just so obvious—pretty much as soon as more than one person could use a computer, there was some kind of mail facility. These ranged from mainframe-centric systems where all of the users of a single computer could write messages to each other, to PC-centric systems where work...

Niagara by Frederic Edwin Church, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at a setback for California Forever, a $500 million artillery shell plant not producing any shells, the difficulty of recycling EV batteries, manufacturing wire harnesses, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housekeeping items this week...

0.0 Context Setting It’s Wednesday, July 15th 2026 in Portland, Oregon, and the England football team have just finished being the archetypal England football team. (Only it’s not. Now it’s Thursday.) 0.1 Events: How People Work, Live! ... with Erika Hall Short version: it’s your last call to register to attend How People Work, Live! ... with Erika Hall for Friday, 17 July, at 11am Pacific. Following last week’s How People Work with Matt Jukes, I’m super excited to have...